adobe’s apollo project

Techcrunch has really great interview with Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s chief software architect for the Apollo project. The apollo project is a cross-platform runtime which will use existing Adobe technologies like flash, flex, & pdf along with standards based html and ajax to create downloadable web apps. These apps could then be used even when a user is not connected to the internet. The interview lacked a lot of technical detail but still made the project sound quite interesting. There was a follow-up article on TechCrunch which shows some screenshots of demo app developed by Adobe.

If Adobe can provide a solution for installable rich-client apps which can be easily migrated from current web-based apps and have an easy-to-use data storage/sync solution, I think it would be quite compelling. The flash player currently has something like 98% penetration and is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux and has a sizable developer community. There could be a lot of potential for web-centric sites like flickr, youtube, last.fm, etc. Flickr could have a standard rich client for managing and uploading your locally stored photos whereas youtube could provide a simple video editor and encoder so that users can upload their movies already encoded as flash video. Another interesting item is that Adobe has open-sourced their ActionScript virtual machine to the Mozilla Foundation. Actionscript, which is used in Flash, is simply an implementation of ECMAScript which is standard used for Javascript. This is a great move for Adobe. Besides getting the benefit of open-source development on the VM, Adobe will be using the same VM in Flash and PDF that Mozilla will use it within Firefox for Javascript. This provides a really great story to developers of web-centric client apps and should definitely help the platform pick up mass and steam.

And who gets screwed if this takes off? Microsoft. Microsoft has a similar competing technology called Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF. The only problem is that it only works on Windows. Interestingly, the interview briefly talks about WPF and Lynch points out that WPF will only be supported on Vista and XP SP2 so Apollo will actually be supporting more versions of Windows (98, XP) than Microsoft itself.

ConceptShare. video tour of a web-based collaboration tool. pretty nice demo. really good mix of ajax and flash. seemed a little limited in scope but well executed.

Big Ideas come out of Big Pencils. some badass flash UI. via 3rdparty

jumpcut is youtube with some pretty impressive editing features. Take any movie on the site and click “remix” you can mix in other video and do an impressive set of transition and visual effects in real time. all in flash. very well executed.

Dave Werner’s Portfolio 2006. the random things you find on the internet. this portfolio site is damn cool. each project has a movie and a collage of the process that looks slick.

As with any google announcement, the blogging world can’t stop talking about it. Google Finance is loaded eye candy but, as Om Malik notes, doesn’t change the game. Publishing 2.0 is even harsher in their post saying google should have launched with more advanced tools. My own 2 cents on a tool: My online brokerage has one really handy tool which lets you enter “what if i invested on these date” and shows the returns. Unfortunately, they do just about everything else wrong in terms of information and UI. Still, I think it’s good for google to get this site out now even if it’s lacking “new stuff”. Om Malik points out that Yahoo is probably making a killing on the mortage/broker ads that are on their defacto finance site. I think google’s v1 entry could easily take a cut of this pie. I know whenever I search for a stock price, I start at google.

On first view, I just assumed google implemented a kick-ass ajax graph only to be disapointed when I discovered it’s flash. Still, I think it’s really handy to be able to see a chart from specific date ranges and not just “6 months” or “1 year”. One cool feature is the overlay of news stories on the chart. For instance, if you search for RIM you can see how different legal decisions affected the stock. I wonder if there’s a public api such that you would write your own article, mention some dates, and link in a google chart with those dates overlaid (stuff like “when apple introduced the ipod” or “the 50 times Nortel restated earnings”).

One last interesting point is that the tearsheet includes moderated discussion and blog posts on the company. The blog content is a couple hours old so it might not be as useful to the overzealous daytrader, but does the job for me (this is probably because Google’s blog engine still doesn’t support ping updates. I still find the results better than technorati, which does accept pings). Battelle, who spoke to the Finance project manager right before the launch, points out that the moderated discussion is yet another step by google into the portal space.

Really, I don’t see a reason to bash this finance page. As I said, when looking for stock info I start at google and google finance is good enough to keep me on google real estate (and driving google ads). I think I could be described as a generic (mid-20s) casual investor, so this strikes me as a win for google.